


a hazy shade of winter

by librisdedita



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Hanukkah, anti-christmas fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 18:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13173024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/librisdedita/pseuds/librisdedita
Summary: Fluff in which the characters bond over how ubiquitous and annoying Christmas is.





	a hazy shade of winter

**Author's Note:**

> This is just some fluff because Christmas is a very trying time for me and quite a few of my friends, so here, have Marvel characters griping about it too.
> 
> I am not Jewish; please let me know if I have made a mistake somewhere.
> 
> Title from the Simon and Garfunkel song of the same name.

Wanda was idly poking at risotto gently simmering in a pan when the doorbell rang. She jumped a little, half-startled and not quite yet used to having her own front door, to be able to control who came in and out of her space, at least nominally. (After all, it wasn’t as if she could really refuse to let the agents in when they came round, every fortnight regular as clockwork, but she could at least pretend that she had agency, and that was better than before.) Today was not the day that the agents came, though, and she seldom got other visitors, so she laid down her fork and hurried for the door, curious and wary.

Peering through the peephole revealed a mass of red curls. Natasha, then. Wanda slid back the deadbolt and unlocked the door, wondering why the Black Widow was at her tiny New York apartment; what had gone wrong this time to bring her here.

“Hi,” she said, opening the door to a rather snowed-upon Natasha.

“Hello, Wanda. May I come in?”

“Of course.” Wanda held the door open for her, gesturing towards the small kitchen. “There are coathooks on the back of the door, give me a moment to lock up.”

Natasha waited patiently, dripping gently on the floor, as Wanda fumbled with the locks. Turning round to take her coat, Wanda noticed the growing damp patch on the carpet.

“Um, would you like a towel for your hair?”

“It’s all right. It will dry soon. Thank you.”

“Did you forget your hat?” Wanda felt stupid as soon as the words came out of her mouth. The Black Widow didn’t forget things.

Natasha smiled thinly. “Would you have opened the door to someone you didn’t recognise?”

Wanda shrugged, conceding the point. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Please.” Natasha sat down at the table, back perfectly straight and hands crossed in her lap. Careful to appear nonthreatening, Wanda thought, but still watching her all the same. Wanda watched her back, in the kettle’s distorted reflection and the fuzzy images in the window. Too tired to make small talk, she moved her risotto off the heat and drummed her fingers on the coffee machine, listening to the small gurgles as it brewed.

Natasha didn’t move until Wanda put her coffee down in front of her, flanking it with milk and sugar and sliding carefully into the opposite seat. Wanda waited, faintly amused, as Natasha poured a generous amount of milk into her coffee and swirled it around; she’d always, somehow, assumed that Natasha drank the blackest, bitterest coffee she could find. Maybe she did, out in public; maybe this was intended to make Wanda feel disarmed, like Natasha was being genuine and vulnerable and not the Black Widow with her.

Maybe she was overthinking it and should just let Natasha drink her coffee without assuming that it was part of some manipulative plot.

Wanda took a deep breath and sipped at her own drink.

When Natasha’s mug was half-empty, she laid her hands on the table and sat up straight again.

“We should talk,” she said.

Wanda almost dropped her mug. “What’s wrong? What has happened now?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Nothing is attacking us. I just think that we should talk.”

Wanda stared at Natasha in a way that she hoped was sufficient to convey her utter confusion.

Natasha sighed. “Sam Wilson keeps politely leaving leaflets under my door about therapy.”

“Oh, that’s where the leaflets have been coming from.” Wanda had her own collection, piled neatly in the corner of a cupboard. Sometimes she took them down and looked through them, allowing herself to think for a moment that these resources were for her, would help people like her, before stacking them neatly back up and closing the door.

“Yes. And as I’m sure you’ve noticed, there aren’t really people who have experience in this kind of thing.” Natasha gestured vaguely, trying to indicate _from an ex-Soviet country_ and _superhero battle trauma_ and _culture shock_ and probably half a dozen things besides.

“Yes.” Wanda sighed. “I do not think one of Sam’s psychologists would be very happy if we turned up on their doorstep. No matter how well-meaning he is.”

“However. I have been thinking. We have experience in this kind of thing.”

Wanda stared at Natasha. “So you think… we should become psychologists?”

Natasha smiled. “No, no, not at all. There would not be much demand for us. No, I simply think we should talk sometimes. I don’t pretend to claim that we have had the same experiences, the same stories, but I think maybe they are more similar to each other than to these Western narratives. At least we would not have to suffer other people’s constant shock that maybe immigrants do not recognise all their cultural references.”

Wanda took a sip of coffee, considering. It might not be so bad. Natasha was intriguing, if extremely intimidating, and the thought of escaping the litany of ‘what, you haven’t heard of that?’ was very appealing.

“And, of course, Yasha.” Natasha added.

Wanda almost spit her coffee out. “The _Winter Soldier_?”

“Why not? I won’t pretend that he’s not dangerous, but neither you nor I could claim that for ourselves. He does, however, have complementary experiences.”

Wanda sighed. Natasha was right, of course. All of them had killed plenty of people; the Winter Soldier was not alone in that. Besides, it would be better to get to know him as at least some semblance as a person than to leave him as an old ghost. All the same.

Natasha stood up, pushing her chair in. “Well, that is that then. I think you have Wednesdays free? I shall text you a time and a place, two days in advance.”

Two days, Wanda thought, so that she could check out the place and make sure that nothing was hiding there. It was a kindness; Natasha could have texted half an hour beforehand, and would probably have preferred to.

“Wait,” she said. “My risotto will be cold soon. Would you like some?”

Natasha smiled and came back into the kitchen. “Thank you. That would be very nice. It’s been a long day.”

 

It was a couple of weeks before Wanda heard anything more from Natasha. She passed the time with a mix of levitating dishes as she washed them to improve the dexterity of her powers, trying to catch up on American pop culture with the help of the internet, and staring at the ceiling wondering why her life was like this now. She was researching ‘Christmas classics’ and trying to work out why on earth _Love Actually_ was considered such a popular movie when her phone chimed gently on the bed beside her.

Natasha’s message (well, the message from the unknown number that she was assuming was Natasha) was short and efficient. _Diner we got great burritos in last time, Thursday, 4pm._

Wanda laughed a little, remembering. The burritos had been great; they’d all piled in to get food after what was supposed to be some simple surveillance had gone horribly wrong. Discovering that the entire building that Clint was perched on was in fact essentially a robot beehive levels of wrong. There had been a lot of swearing, and a lot of fighting, and what Wanda now recognised as far too many Nic Cage impressions (which at the time had just seemed like an appropriate level of panic about robot bees). She suspected that pretty much any food that wasn’t actively rotting would have tasted amazing after that sort of day, but she was hardly going to turn down good food and a chance to leave her apartment.

 _Confirmed_ , Wanda sent. Then, on a whim, she wrote _Do you know why Americans are so obsessed with Love Actually? None of it makes any sense!_

She was poring over a flowchart that someone had made of the relationships - seriously, how could a movie be so confusing that it needed a diagram?! - when her phone chimed again.

_Love is for children & at Christmas all Americans are children. Try going into a mall and you will see._

Wanda clutched her phone to her chest and laughed until she had to lie down.

 

Thursday was cold and crisp, and Wanda dug out her hat and winter coat before venturing out, wrapping herself tightly in thick black wool and tugging her hair out of the collar. She let herself out and shoved her hands in her pockets, conserving warmth and checking that her wallet and keys were still safe where she’d put them moments before. From what she remembered, the diner she was heading for wasn’t more than fifteen minutes’ walk, and she set off, snow crunching underfoot.

Any distance is always longer in the cold, and Wanda was glad to see the lights of the diner spilling out into the street in front of her. She pulled the door open, looking around for red hair and a metal arm, and a wave of warmth and buzz of chatter hit her. Natasha and the Winter Soldier were already there, tucked away in a corner with good view of the door, and she slid into the space left for her, raising her hand in greeting.

“Hey there,” Natasha said, passing her a menu. “Do you want anything in particular, or just a repeat of last time?”

Wanda scanned the menu. “I’m not familiar with many of these; is there anything that you’d recommend?”

“Well, Yasha is having a breakfast burrito, because he has no taste-”

“Someone wrapped breakfast up in a tortilla! How could I pass that up?” the Winter Soldier interjected.

“Like I said, no taste. I am having a chicken quesadilla, which is - here, here’s the picture.”

“Oh, so that’s - cheese? Is there one without cheese?”

“Hm, not a quesadilla, but - here, you can probably order this burrito without the cheese.”

“Okay, thank you. Yes, I will have that.”

Natasha flagged down the waiter and ordered for all three of them, asking for a bottle of their house white as well. Wanda watched, goggle-eyed.

“An entire bottle?”

“We’re all adults here, no? I’d say we’ll share it equally, but in all likelihood Yasha will drink half the bottle and you and I can split the rest.” Natasha poked him in the ribs, very gently.

“You say I have no taste, but you have no manners,” the Winter Soldier grumped. He turned to address Wanda. “It’s good to meet you under slightly calmer circumstances. Call me Barnes.”

“I am glad to meet you also, Barnes.” Wanda hadn’t seen Barnes since he’d disappeared into a bevy of doctors and a glass cocoon on arriving in Wakanda; she’d been eventually issued a work visa for something to do with Stark Industries, and had left for New York before he emerged. He looked a bit more human now, but that wasn’t really saying much; none of them had looked anything remotely resembling okay by the time they’d landed in Wakanda.

The wine came sooner than the food, and Natasha poured them all generous glasses. Wanda eyed hers with a little trepidation - she wasn’t really in the habit of drinking (and presenting a foreign passport as ID was never a good time), and she wasn’t sure how her tolerance would stand up - but she raised it anyway to join in Natasha’s toast.

“To fucked-up lives and friends who share them!” Natasha announced. Wanda laughed a little, trying to mask the swell of surprised joy that rose inside her: friends. She hadn’t thought of herself as someone’s friend for longer than she really wanted to think about; even if it was only Natasha’s politeness to someone who reminded her of herself a little, she’d happily take it without questioning too hard.

The food was as good as she’d remembered it, even without post-battle exhaustion to sharpen her hunger. Barnes devoured his breakfast burrito as if he hadn’t eaten in years, and Natasha was managing the melted cheese much better than Wanda; no awkward strings hanging out of her mouth. Logistical problems aside, though, it was warm and tasty, and the wine was softening some of Wanda’s reserves.

“So,” Natasha said, after they’d all eaten enough to quell the immediate ravenous winter hunger, “who is ready to murder people over their terrible Christmas music yet?”

“It started in fuckin’ _October_!” Barnes groaned. “And Steve has just been so excited, running around like a little kid at his first Christmas, that I haven’t had the heart to stop him. Our apartment looks like a paper store exploded in it, and he starts goddamn dancing whenever we’re somewhere playing music.”

Wanda clapped her hands over her mouth, giggling at the thought of the man whom she’d only seen sombre and focused bouncing around like a child.

Barnes glared at her. “You don’t know the half of it! We had to go and get a fuckin’ wreath the other day, but Mr goddamn Back-In-My-Day insisted that we couldn’t just _buy_ one; oh no. We had to find some place where ivy and holly were just growing - in New York City! - and then climb over the fences to collect enough for a wreath or twelve. And when I pointed out that, you know, I’m not exactly a pillar of the law, but those fences were probably there for a reason, and it would be a fine headline for Captain America to be caught trespassing, he gave me this whole speech about how this should be free land, and how between the enclosure movement and stealing all this land from Native Americans all land claims were spurious anyway and people should be ashamed to keep this fine greenery from public use. And then I gave him the bag of ivy that I’d gotten while he was flapping his mouth, and told him to shut up and get out of here before the owners came.”

By this point, Natasha was leaning against Wanda’s shoulder in order to laugh in comfort. Wanda watched her carefully, unsure of quite what was happening, but didn’t move.

“So, do you now have the perfect wreath?” Natasha said, from her precarious perch.

“We have a wreath, I wouldn’t go so far as to say the perfect wreath. It looks like someone plaited some ivy strands into a circle, and then that maybe someone who was a bit tired of the whole fuckin’ endeavour stabbed it with a bunch of holly leaves. Which might have been what happened.”

Wanda laughed. “You could have saved some time by just picking a wreath off one of the doors in my apartment building; there are already far too many. Some of them even play terrible tinny Christmas music when you walk past them.”

“Well, at least that’s a small mercy. Can’t imagine what would’ve happened if the door kept playing fuckin’ Jingle Bells at me every time I went in and out.”

“Please, come to my building and find out. I might just scream the next time one of them goes off.”

Natasha sat up and leaned forward. “No, no, Yasha’s theatrics aren’t the best way around this problem.”

“Theatrics?” Barnes interjected, looking wounded and betrayed.

Natasha waved a hand at him. “No, instead what we need is some infiltration tactics. These kinds of sensors are very easy to disable, once you know what you’re doing; the trick is just not to let anyone see you. Now, Wanda, what is the foot traffic like in your building?”

 

A few days later, there was a knock at Wanda’s door. She got up to answer it, and realised as she did so that there’d been no sound of footsteps coming up to the door. Assassins? Spies? It would be a very polite assassin to knock first, though; she unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door, keeping her aether spooled at her fingertips just in case.

It was Barnes and Natasha, dressed head to foot in black (but in much more comfortable black outfits than either of their official Avengers uniforms) and shaking with silent laughter. Wanda smiled and shook her head, and gestured them inside, closing the door behind them.

As soon as the door was closed, their laughter became audible; Barnes throwing himself down onto the large sofa to guffaw in peace, and Natasha chuckling quietly and gleefully and hanging their coats up on the back of the door.

Wanda put the kettle on. “What is so funny? And does it have to do with why you were creeping around outside my door? Or is that just a natural tendency?”

Natasha smiled. “All of the sensors in the wreaths in your building have now suffered a mysterious failure.”

“Very mysterious.” Barnes sat up. “No one can work it out. Maybe it’s to do with some new experiment by that notorious mad scientist, Mr Stark.”

“Who can predict what terrible thing he might do next,” Natasha agreed. “Maybe it’s some sort of electromagnetic pulse that has completely confused only the motion sensors in the wreaths in this building. It’s a very local problem.”

Wanda laughed. “Is that so? And of course the two assassins who have shown up inside my apartment have nothing whatsoever to do with this.”

“Nothing at all! We were just dropping in on a friend, as you do. Filling her with Christmas spirit. It’s practically an obligation.” Barnes nodded solemnly.

“I think this is more anti-Christmas spirit,” Wanda retorted. “No one here likes Christmas.”

“Shhhh!” Natasha put a finger to her mouth. “The Christmas police might hear you, and decide that we all need an extra dose of terrible music!”

“The horror!” Wanda snorted. “Okay, do you want tea or coffee? I have -” she rummaged around in the cupboard above the kettle “English Breakfast, jasmine tea, and… coffee.”

“I would very much appreciate some jasmine tea, thank you.” Natasha came over to look more closely at the tea selection.

“I want… food. Engineering mysterious catastrophes is hungry work.” Barnes unfolded himself from the sofa.

“Oh please, all you did was stand watch while I dealt with matters.”

“Nevertheless. Food! I hear that in the future, you can get pizza delivered?”

Natasha didn’t bother turning her head. “In the future, you can look up a pizza delivery place on the phone that Stark gave you.”

“Fine, fine.” Barnes turned to Wanda, stage-whispering. “I’m doing you a favour; if you let Natasha call for delivery, she invents sketchy businesses. Last time, we had some poor delivery boy trying to find ‘Roman’s Empire-Toppling Services’.”

“We got the pizza, didn’t we? And a little light entertainment.” Natasha turned to Wanda. “Are we interrupting anything? Yasha is very enthusiastic about the possibility of food at any possible point, but I don’t want to intrude.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” Wanda swept up that day’s mail from the table, shoving it in the corner of the counter. “I’m not quite sure I have enough chairs, though.”

“Oh, that’s fine, I’ll sit anywhere.” Natasha hopped up onto the counter, folding herself up to sit cross-legged and only just fitting under the cupboards.

“What do you want on your pizza, Wanda?” Barnes called, phone to his ear. “I’m getting pepperoni for me and this weird chicken-pepper-garlic one that Nat likes.”

“Oh, something without meat, please. Do they have olives and mushrooms?”

“Yeah, okay, mushrooms and olives for Wanda.” Barnes turned his attention back to the phone, finishing the order. “Okay, they should be here in about twenty minutes.”

The pizza, when it came, was delicious, and Wanda’s tiny kitchen was filled with chatter and interesting smells. A lot of the chatter came from Barnes, who, at ease and full of pizza, turned out to have a great many stories of Horrifying Escapades with Young Steve. Young Steve apparently had no sense of when he was pushing his luck, or when his luck had already been definitively pushed and was in fact toppling off the edge of the cliff to its doom. Wanda felt that it was possible that some of these stories might be a little exaggerated - no matter how reckless Captain America was (and that was pretty reckless, even now), she didn’t think that he would really have taken on five people just because they’d insulted a passer-by’s hairstyle - but they were good listening, and she, too, was warm and full of pizza.

 

It was a couple of weeks before they met up again, mostly due to an interruption by snow homunculi. The homunculi didn’t pose too much of a threat once Hawkeye had started shooting them with literal flaming arrows - “Impractical, they said? I’ll show them!!”, he’d screamed from the rooftops, and everyone had winced away from their earpieces - but it had been cold and messy work, and once the last homunculus had been rendered into unthreatening slush, they’d all retreated to their apartments to warm back up for a few days.

A couple of days later, Wanda got a text from Natasha.

_playing prank on Yasha. care to join? outside his apartment, 10pm tonight._

Wanda grinned. This was going to be good.

When she turned up, Natasha was already hard at work, and Wanda clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her squeal of delight. Large snow forms were starting to rise from the ground and menace the windows of Barnes and Steve’s apartment, and, as Natasha explained in a repressed giggle, would look, to a person groggy from pre-coffee mornings, like a precisely targeted return of the homunculi.

Wanda set to work shaping the snow into sufficiently terrifying poses. After a while, she found herself using her aether to help, steadying a precarious snowball with it as she cemented the joins, or building snow faces well above her head. She paused for a moment when she first noticed it tendrilling around her, and felt Natasha pause too; she didn’t tend to use it out of combat, trying instead to pass herself off as a normal, unthreatening civilian.

Natasha appeared by her shoulder, face lit by the aether’s weird red glow. Wanda watched her for a couple of seconds that felt like an eternity, half convinced that her slip in concentration was a dreadful mistake, that surely Natasha would realise that she’d made a mistake; that Wanda’s nature wasn’t so easily changeable with kindness and food.

Natasha’s face split into a grin.

“Hey, how tired are you? Can you boost me up so I can make these faces better?”

Wanda laughed, and pushed Natasha off the ground so suddenly that she flailed around in midair for a moment, waving her arms wildly and trying to grasp at insubstantial aether. She stuck her tongue out and sprung forwards onto her hands, pointing her toes triumphantly at the night sky; Wanda felt her aether move with Natasha almost before she’d even thought about it, before she even knew what Natasha was doing, and thought: _oh_. Oh. Her smile cut the night to match Natasha’s, and a feeling like fire, like warmth and home and protection, blossomed in her chest until she felt like maybe she’d explode and shower the night in red false-stars.

 

The night didn’t get any less silly as it wore on. By 1am, they were putting the finishing touches to their snow sculptures, which by this point were both large and alarming, successfully looming over the apartment windows. Natasha took a stick and wrote ‘xoxo N + W’ in large letters by the front door for Barnes to see when he came outside to investigate.

“Okay, so now what?” Wanda was beginning to feel the cold a little, even through her long wool coat. “Do we just wait here until he wakes up? When even is that?”

“Around half past six. Steve is one of those terrible people who gets up at half past five to work out, so Yasha tries to have breakfast ready by the time he gets back.”

“Wait, won’t Steve see all this when he leaves then?”

“No, no - he uses the basement gym in the winter. In the summer he goes jogging.” Natasha shuddered at the thought. “He tried to get Yasha to go with him a few times, but that never really ended well; Yasha insists that jogging is for people without metal arms, and I can’t say I blame him.”

Wanda screwed up her courage. “Are - are they dating? I’ve never been quite sure, and it feels rude to ask, but-’

Natasha shrugged. “They get along however works for them. I don’t ask further; I don’t particularly want anecdotes from Yasha’s real or imagined sex life, for one thing. But beyond that - I mean, does it matter? They obviously care about each other. That’s all they need us to know, for now.”

Wanda nodded, a little downcast.

“Anyway. I have a hotel room, just across the way. I’m going to sleep for a few hours, and then hide over here to film Barnes when he wakes up. I was going to ask if you wanted to join me, but you look very cold; you should get home. I’ll send you the footage in the morning.”

Wanda thought for a moment about spending what was left of the night in a room with Natasha, crouching in a hedge together and feeling her body heat, and decided that yes, she had probably go home. She’d said her goodbyes and started walking off when she suddenly heard Natasha’s quiet footsteps, only even audible because the street was almost silent.

“Hey,” Natasha said, appearing at her shoulder. “This was a good prank.” She hugged Wanda quickly, and just as suddenly disappeared back into the darkness.

Wanda walked home smiling.

 

When she woke up the next morning, her phone lock screen was overflowing with notifications. She rolled over in bed and opened the first one: a video message from Natasha.

The video showed the front of Barnes’ apartment, before zooming in on a window with the blinds down. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, and then the blinds were pulled up to reveal Barnes glaring out at the world. The glare quickly changed to horror, and then an angrier glare, as he took in the scene outside the window. He rushed out of the kitchen and burst through the front door almost immediately afterwards, somehow having acquired a knife along the way, and skidded to a stop on seeing the message in the snow. The next few minutes of footage were just Barnes swearing inventively while stabbing and beheading various snow creatures, until a large snowball hurtled straight at the camera and the video abruptly cut off.

Wanda laughed and laughed.

The next notification was a text from Natasha: _shit, we’ve been compromised._

Most of the rest were texts from Barnes to a group chat he’d set up with her and Natasha. They started off with _what is this FUCKING ABOMINATION in my garden, I had to spend my morning TEARING IT DOWN so steve didn’t try to ATTACK IT_ and then just kind of degraded from there onwards, until the last few messages were Barnes threatening to eviscerate Natasha in more and more arcane and ridiculous ways, finishing with a threat to _tickle you to pieces next time I see you!!!_

Tickling? Wanda typed. Seems a bit mild.

It wasn’t long before her phone chimed with a response from Barnes. _Oh you do not even know how ticklish she is. ALSO I WILL HAVE TO SWEAR REVENGE ON YOU TOO, DON’T THINK YOU’VE ESCAPED._

Wanda shook her head and went about getting her breakfast.

A few days later, they were making fun of various Christmas films at Barnes’ apartment; they’d criticised the tactics in Die Hard (“I could have done better with a shoelace and a bottle of champagne,” Natasha complained), mocked It’s a Wonderful Life for being overly saccharine, and were attempting to make sense of The Muppet Christmas Carol. This was a little difficult: neither Wanda nor Natasha knew the original story, and Barnes had last read it sometime before the war, so they were trying to piece together half-forgotten fragments of story with the ridiculous puppet adventures happening on the screen. It wasn’t working too well.

Natasha leaned over and muted the television. “No more of this! There is no sense here. It’s deliberately designed to mess with us.”

“Do you think that maybe we should have figured out what the Muppets were first?” Wanda ventured.

“Who has the time to watch something in order to understand another thing? It’s the comics talk all over again!”

They all shuddered. Coulson had attempted to give them the Comics Talk several times, starting from the Captain America wartime comics and going on from there. Wanda had got the furthest of all of them, drawing patient genealogies and flowcharts on Coulson’s whiteboard in an effort to understand. Barnes, on the other hand, had distracted him with stories about Young Steve (a technique which worked any time that he was bored of Coulson’s explanations), and Natasha had just left after five minutes, citing work and deadlines.

“Well, what then? Should we order some food?” Barnes turned the television off and reached for his phone.

“Oh, you and your food.” Natasha poked him.

“I am a growing cyborg and I need my nutrition.” Barnes said, poker-faced.

Wanda laughed. “No, I should get home. I have errands to run.”

“And I have a cat that will be yowling for its dinner soon enough.” Natasha stood up as well. “Shall we? I think we go the same way for a while; I’ll walk with you.”

Her confidence bolstered by Natasha’s casual friendship, Wanda drew a deep breath. “Hey, uh, next Tuesday is the first night of Hanukkah. Would you both care to come over?”

“Of course!” Barnes grinned. “I can make latkes! I make excellent latkes.”

“When, exactly, did you last make excellent latkes?” Natasha asked dryly.

“Look, potatoes then are potatoes now, how hard can it be? Everything will be fine. It will be great!”

“I’m sure it will.” Natasha turned to Wanda. “I’ll be glad to be there also. We’d better go, though, it’s only going to get colder outside.”

“Yes, let’s go.”

 

The next Tuesday, Natasha and Barnes announced their arrival with loud banging in the early afternoon. Wanda jumped up to open the door, greeting them and ushering them in; the apartment was small enough that the three of them almost filled it.

Somewhere along the way, Wanda found her arms full of bags; she pulled out a box of sufganiyot and a bottle of wine.

“Oh, how lovely! I’d been wondering where to find sufganiyot - thank you!”

Natasha smiled. “I found a small Jewish bakery - I’ll show you some day, if you like. And the wine is kosher too.”

“Thank you so much! How did you know where to find these?” Wanda was already pulling glasses down for the wine.

“It’s my job to know things.” Natasha pulled her best mysterious-spy face.

“And you definitely had a mission where you needed to find all the places to buy kosher wine in New York. Completely believeable.” Wanda swung around. “Here, Barnes, have some wine - oh my goodness, what is that?”

Barnes was extricating a large and knobby sack of potatoes from his backpack. “It’s potatoes, what do you think it is? Do you have a potato peeler? Because I can peel these with a knife, but I tell you what, potato peelers are one of the best things about the future.”

“That’s so many potatoes! Oh, yes, here - just put them by the table, I’ll get out some bowls and the grater.”

“I don’t know about you, Wanda, but I can eat a lot of latkes.” Barnes brought the potatoes over, and soon enough they were all set up in the small kitchen, with Natasha and Barnes peeling the potatoes at the table and Wanda grating them next to the sink.

Once there was a small mountain of grated potato building up, Barnes abdicated the (much larger) pile of whole potatoes and started assembling and frying the latkes themselves. His first few were a disaster (which he blamed on ‘these new-fangled electric stovetops’ and hastily ate), but before too long, there was a growing pile of hot latkes on plates. Natasha pushed away the (still mostly full) bag of potatoes to make room and Wanda rummaged through her cupboards.

“Here, I have sour cream, and I also have applesauce if you really want it.”

“Applesauce is clearly the better topping,” Natasha said, sliding the jar towards herself and examining it, “because it is pareve and thus restricts the options for the rest of the meal less.”

“Sour cream is clearly the better topping,” Wanda retorted, “because it is _sour cream_ and not some sort of terrible mushy apple concoction. Also, what sort of meat are you planning on having with latkes?”

“You never know! There might be a meat emergency! It is always better to be prepared!” Natasha gestured emphatically with a spoon.

“A _meat emergency_?”

“You are both wrong,” Barnes interrupted, “because I have the best latke topping right here.” He produced a large jar out of a pocket and set it down on the table.

Natasha picked it up. “This is… mincemeat? Yasha, why the hell do you put mincemeat on your latkes?”

Wanda stared at it. “What even is this?”

Barnes shrugged. “Look, sometimes you are making mince pies, and also you are making latkes, because there is a lot of seasonal baking to do and everyone else is out working or in bed sick. And maybe you drop a bit of mincemeat on a latke, and you figure you’d best eat it before anyone sees, and then you discover that it’s the best thing ever.”

“Well, I guess we’d better try this. At least he got the vegetarian version.” Natasha dropped a spoonful on a latke and then pushed the jar towards Wanda. “Here, one of the weirdest Western traditions.”

Wanda poked at it tentatively, and then tried it on her own latke. “This is… not good. Why does it taste like this? Why is this a thing people eat?”

“We just don’t know.” Natasha made an awful face. “This is really terrible, Yasha. You have, I reiterate, no taste whatsoever.”

“All the more for me!” Barnes said, swiping the jar back.

 

They’d put the finished latkes up for later and were nearly done cleaning up when Wanda looked at her phone and said ‘Oh, oh, it’s time.” and gestured the others towards the window opposite them, where she’d set up her menorah. It was new, for her first Hanukkah in New York, and she felt a pang in her chest as she remembered all the years with her family’s old menorah, now long lost under rubble in Sokovia.

Wanda took a deep breath and lit the shamash, reciting the blessings and letting the routine steady her. She could feel the others behind, Natasha tense and listening carefully and Barnes quiet and sombre. That made sense, she thought; it seemed like Barnes, at least, had heard these selfsame blessings before, a lifetime ago. She lit the first candle and stayed there for a moment, looking down into the road below and watching the people hurry back and forth, just beginning to get off work and go back home.

Barnes put a hand on her shoulder, pointing into the distance. “Hey, do you see that, over there?”

Wanda squinted. “What? What am I looking at?”

“Right over there - see, in the window? I think someone else is lighting their menorah.”

Wanda looked harder, and could just see the flicker of candles in the distance. She smiled; logically, of course, she knew that there were plenty of Jews in New York, that it was almost famous for it, but still, it was good to see nonetheless.

“What now?” Natasha’s voice was uncharacteristically small.

Wanda grinned. “Do you know how to play dreidel?”

 

Later, sleepy from wine and food and comprehensively out of chocolate coins, she looked around the room and smiled. Natasha and Barnes were still fiercely gambling for chocolate coins, having added so many new rules that Wanda had completely lost the thread of what was going on there. They’d demolished all the food - Barnes had not been kidding about the amount he could eat - and Natasha was drinking the last of the wine.

Natasha noticed her stirring and poked her gently. “I thought you’d fallen asleep there.”

“Mmmm, not quite. Just trying to work out what you’re playing there.”

“Oh, neither of us know anymore, don’t even try.” Natasha put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer.

Wanda rested her head on Natasha’s shoulder and allowed herself to drift off a little, surrounded by friends and the unfamiliar sensation of home.


End file.
